We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some 'party'; we let them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We cheat our government, we let our leaders loot it, and we let them wheedle and bribe our sovereignty from us. Lincoln Steffens in The Shame of the Cities.